The "COM+ Event System" Service will not enter the "Started" State

The following may help you if your “COM+ Event System” service does not start successfully. The service stops responding (hangs) and the Services Management Console shows the service as "Starting". You may also find some other services such as the "Windows installer Service" will not start.

The first obvious check is to ensure that the RPC Service is correctly functioning, since this is one of the Event Systems dependencies. Normally another good suggestion has been to try to either re-register Event System or even in more extreme cases re-install COM+.

Re-registering EventSystem:
-Backup and Remove the following registry Key: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventSystem" and reboot;
-Run "Regsvr32 es.dll" and reboot again.

Reinstalling COM+:
-Steps as per article: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/315296.

However in a recent issue, I have seen that this has not resolved the problem and trying to re-install COM+ also fails.

A worthwhile suggestion is to check the “DCOM Server Process Launcher” Service. This service should be configured to "automatic" start-up and should be "started". If you have found this is not the case, then make the change and reboot the machine. Following this the Event System Service may now starts successfully.

If (and only if) you have already tried to re-install COM+ before this change, you should again follow the steps in KB 315296 to ensure the COM+ installation now completes successfully.

Chris Forster